Martin Johnson Heade

Martin Johnson Heade (born August 11, 1819, Lumberville, Pennsylvania, U.S.—died September 4, 1904, St. Augustine, Florida) was an American painter known for his seascapes and still-life paintings and associated with the luminist aesthetic.

Heade grew up in rural Pennsylvania and studied art with his neighbour the folk artist Edward Hicks and possibly with Hicks’s cousin Thomas Hicks, a portrait painter. He exhibited his work publicly for the first time in 1841, at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, and from that point proceeded to exhibit frequently. Heade’s earliest works were genre paintings and portraits of notable figures, such as American military and political leader Sam Houston (1847) and the Rev. Noah Hunt Schenck (before 1849).

Though he moved to New York City in 1843, Heade did not settle there until 1859. Instead, he traveled regularly, painting in locations throughout the United States and Europe. He began painting landscapes in the mid-1850s. Many of his coastal scenes of the late 1850s and early 1860s depict dark waters and skies that suggest an impending storm (e.g., Approaching Thunder Storm [1859] and Approaching Storm, Beach near Newport [c. 1861–62]). Art historians have interpreted that prevalent theme to be Heade’s expression of the imminent Civil War. Heade’s later landscape paintings are less ominous, featuring glowing, calm skies or brilliant sunsets over salt marshes and haystacks at points along eastern shores of the United States. In 1863 Heade traveled to Brazil, where he was enchanted by the tropical setting and the hummingbirds. He set out to create illustrations for a book on the birds and produced numerous compositions, including a series of some 20 small paintings that he called “The Gems of Brazil.” Emperor Dom Pedro II of Brazil was impressed with Heade’s work and made him a Knight of the Order of the Rose, an imperial order established in 1829. By 1871 Heade had traveled at least twice more to both Central America and South America. His paintings inspired by those later trips also feature hummingbirds, but he began to set them among tropical flowers, as in Passion Flowers and Hummingbirds (1873–80) and Orchids and Spray Orchids with Hummingbirds (1875–90). He also painted coastal scenes and highly detailed still lifes of flowers alone (e.g., Magnolias on Gold Velvet Cloth [c. 1888–90]).

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In 1883 Heade finally settled in St. Augustine, Florida, where he married for the first time and lived the rest of his life. He continued to paint and found a patron in oil tycoon Henry M. Flagler. After Heade’s death his work was forgotten until the 1940s, when renewed interest in American painting unearthed his large body of work, which in turn inspired numerous exhibitions and catalogs as well as increasingly high prices at auction.